Clearly, the chief reasoning of NBA owners for declining to add Hansen and Steve Ballmer to their list of owners was that they were from Seattle. When the NBA ripped their team of 41 years out of Seattle back in 2007, it was intended as an object lesson for the rest of the league: Unless you bow to our extortion demands, you will lose your team.
Sacramento, obviously, got that lesson. After teetering on losing the Kings because of the failure to build a new arena, the city gave up every ounce of its soul in its desperate effort to keep the NBA in town. The new arena deal requires the taxpayers to foot about 60 percent of the tab.
So of course the NBA was going to reward the city that gave in to their extortion demands. And it would continue to punish the city that insists on limiting the taxpayers' role in enriching billionaire owners and their exposure to ever-ratcheting arena costs.
You see, Seattle thought it had done everything right for years. Its fans always supported the Sonics -- even when they sucked, the team still averaged 15,000 a game -- and were among the most rabid and knowledgeable in the league. (I was myself a season ticket holder for over a decade.) There's a reason so many NBA teams are populated with players from Seattle high schools: It is a basketball-saturated town.
We even bellied up to the bar in the 1990s on the arena demands -- spent $100 million tearing apart and renovating the old Seattle Center Coliseum, three-quarters of which was paid for by Seattle taxpayers. When it reopened in 1995, David Stern came and proclaimed the new facility as state-of-the-art for the next generation.
As you know, I'm not an Obama fan. But there's just no "there" there with this Benghazi story. Unfortunately, with yesterday's email release, the administration only added more chum for the sharks in the water and nothing this president does will be enough to satisfy them. Who could have known?
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House release of some 100 pages of emails and notes about the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year has failed to satisfy congressional Republicans, who are demanding more information.
“Why not release all of the unclassified documents?” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “The president has repeatedly said that when he gets new information, he’ll release it to the public. Why not release — instead of the hand-picked ones — why not release all the unclassified documents?”
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday Republicans hoped “this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come,” while the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee pressed the Pentagon for more details about military orders around the time of the attack and what military aircraft were in the region.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed when militants struck the U.S. mission and CIA annex in twin nighttime attacks on Sept. 11, 2012.
Republicans have accused the Obama administration of misleading the American people about the circumstances of the attack, playing down a terrorist strike that would reflect poorly on President Barack Obama in the heat of a presidential race. Obama has dismissed charges of a cover-up and suggested on Monday that the criticism was politically motivated.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on Thursday declared that efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care reform law were "now revived" after the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted that it had inappropriately targeted conservative groups to determine if they had abused their tax-exempt status.
At a tea party rally in Washington D.C., the Minnesota Republican pointed to the scandal as evidence that the IRS should not be allowed to distribute subsidies for health care coverage through state exchanges and issue penalties for individuals who elect not get insurance.
"As someone who formerly worked for the IRS, I can tell you this is the largest ramp-up and expansion, both of employees but also on an area of jurisdiction on one of the largest new entitlement programs that the American people have seen in decades," she told the crowd. "That's why it's crucial that we ask these questions now, when our most personal, sensitive, intimate information -- our health care information -- will all be centralized in a national federal database."
Things got heated and a bit insane, as they usually do, when Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) got miffed when Attorney General Eric Holder rather politely told Gohmert he didn't know what he was talking about, and that he should refrain some stating as fact what were only Gohmert's conjectures on what may or may not have occurred. The confontation happened during a House Judiciary hearing into the Boston Bombing. Gohmert was disparaging the FBI's handling of the case.
ERIC HOLDER: “You don’t know what the FBI did. You don’t know what the FBI’s interaction was with the Russians. You don’t know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that. And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough, or taken exception to my characterization of them as being thorough. I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know. That is all.”
Gohmert took exception to the fact that his wild allegations would not be taken seriously as facts, and called for a point of personal privilege to defend his honor. Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) noted Gohmert's time had expired but had Holder state again why he considered what Gohmert had said was untrue, which he did, much to the consternation of Gohmert.
A visibly flustered Gohmert then tried for another point of personal privilege, but was rebuked as his time had expired. Gohmert then shouted over the Chairman one of the best lines of the year:
LOUIE GOHMERT: "I cannot have a witness challenge my character! The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!"
The British use this as a joking expression ("cast asparagus" on something) but somehow I don't think Gohmert was joking at all. He really is this dumb.
Megyn Kelly went there on her show Wednesday, but you knew this was the goal all along, right? Republicans have wet dreams every night of a special prosecutor so they can harass Barack Obama through the last three and a half years of his presidency and make sure they don't get anything done. From Benghazi to Fast and Furious, they're practically squirming with anticipation.
For the recipe to work, they have to distort the facts in order to suggest something happened that didn't. Via Media Matters:
Fox News ignored President Obama's explicit demand for accountability in the wake of news that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra scrutiny to conservative groups. The network's omission gave it cover to accuse Obama of not taking the IRS's actions seriously and to call for a special prosecutor.
They also ignored the fact that the IG's report clearly stated that targeting was not exclusively limited to conservatives, because of course, that would be too much like the truth. Instead, they tried to pretend the president wasn't taking the scandal seriously, and went even farther into fantasyland in order to gin up their audience for only one thing.
Kelly and Stirewalt used their mischaracterization of Obama's response to call for a special prosecutor into the IRS's actions. Stirewalt told Kelly that if he were the president, he would "find a Republican of good standing" to appoint as an independent investigator. Kelly responded with the charge, "Where is the harm to this administration, if as these IRS employees state, no one outside of the IRS had anything to do with this, this was just IRS employees deciding to target conservatives. So if the White House and no one else had anything to do with it, where is the harm? Why doesn't the president just say 'absolutely'?"
Yep, even after Barack Obama became the first two-term president since Eisenhower to win more than 51% of the popular vote in two elections, giggling wingnuts like Erickson are still using the "Black Jimmy Carter" line. And despite the non-stop giddy SCANDAL! drumbeat by right-wingers, his approval rating is at 49%.
In comparison, after the actual scandals of Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Abu Grhaib, FISA, the US Attorney firings, and Valerie Plame, George W. Bush spent his last three years in the 30s.
Farmers be warned: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Monsanto in its suit against an Indiana farmer who planted its genetically modified seeds without paying the company. The case has been closely watched for its bearing on companies that hold patents on DNA molecules and other self-replicating products, but Justice Elena Kagan stressed that the court was ruling narrowly, addressing only the farmer’s violation of patent law. The farmer first bought seeds for a crop of soybeans that had been engineered to be resistant to the pesticide Roundup, which is also a Monsanto product. But for his second crop, he took a mix of seeds from a grain elevator, sprayed them with Roundup, and planted seeds from the plants that survived, exploiting what he believed to be a loophole in the contract.
Remember folks, loopholes are only for the fabulously wealthy.
